The Little Shadows

The Double Act

For a week, Aurora and Jimmy rehearsed the double act in the back parlour at Mrs. Jewett’s. Twice with Mama playing piano for them, once with Clover—but the fourth time, Mama’s head was too bad and she wanted Clover to sit with her; Bella was out for a spin with Nando and Verrall, Nando having sworn that he’d fixed whatever was wrong with the Model T. Aurora said not to fret, she could sing the tune while she and Jimmy ran through the steps.

When Jimmy arrived Aurora took him to Mrs. Jewett’s back parlour where the old piano was, then pulled the pocket doors back along their runner till the two sides met tight, and locked them top and bottom, brass sliding into brass in a silky glide and drop.

He opened the piano and set out the sheet music. Turning, he watched as she went first to one window, then the other, pulling down the blinds. It was just past ten in the morning and the house was quiet for a spell, boarders gone off to work or in their rooms, Mrs. Jewett and the help busy in the kitchen, baking pies for the boarders’ dinner.

She took the big cushions from the window seat and threw them down onto the floor with soft flumps, and she undid her blouse with fingers that trembled and fumbled and worked fast.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, walking over the polished floor towards her.

‘There is not much time, don’t waste it.’ Her blouse fell, the ribbon cummerbund fell, and she stepped out of her skirt, but there was still so much fabric to get through. She kicked at the pool of froth and linen on the floor, and said, ‘Please help me, please.’

He untied the waistband of her petticoat and knelt to draw it down, and buried his face in the smell and warmth of her, and she put her hands on his head. She hummed the tune as loudly as she could, and knelt beside him, and they sank together onto the pile of clothes and pillows—and really, Aurora thought, it was about time.

Turning her head away so as not to deafen him, she sang, ‘I never envied the rich millionaires, I never wanted to have what was theirs, I never bother about their affairs … All that I want is a chance to be glad, I’ve grown so tired of being so sad, There’s only one thing I wish that I had, That’s you, just you.’

As he pushed inside her, she had to stop singing or it would become an ululation.

Silent, then. Silence, silence, breathing carefully in and out, his arms under her hands and the fiery rage that he created spreading through her whole body, more than the blaze of the butterfly wings had been, spearing her or maybe going clear through her, their spirits dissolving into each other or knifing through and between, and there was no stopping it, their bodies in some trance of perfect time and beat, and beat, everything running between them like electricity, to shock them and to run the engines of them forward, until they died.

Very quietly, and very quickly.

She held him closer, closer, and then rolled him sideways and sprang up and dashed to the piano, playing the chorus through in a fine gallop, and then said loudly, ‘All right, one more time—I never envied the rich millionaires, I never wanted to have what was theirs, I never bother about their affairs—’ but when he reached for her she felt a warm liquidity run down the inside of her thigh, and she shuddered and laughed and shook her head, and step-stepped around the room (still in her shoes, they had not got so far as taking off her stockings), dancing as loud-clacking as might be while she grabbed one garment at a time and shrugged into it or under it, and he lay back on the cushions, laughing without the faintest sound.

‘Perhaps we need a gramophone,’ he said, when she was tight and tidy once more.


Four Months, Maybe Five

On Mondays, when the rest of the town was open for business, the vaudeville people took each other out for supper to Mariaggi’s or visited burlesque theatres, or danced at one of the big hotels. Jimmy and Aurora went dancing the Monday night before their premier at the Walker as the Double-Glide Duo. Aurora took Clover along for propriety; Bella had begged to come too, but Aurora had been hard as coal and would not let her. Mama told Bella she needed her to help with the finishing on the white dress, and that was the final word. Bella had thrashed off to the bedroom in a serious huff.

The Palm Lounge at the Fort Garry Hotel had a lovely little band, but it was not mere pleasure for Jimmy and Aurora to dance there: they were advertisements for themselves. Walker had taken a party there and all evening he directed their attention to Aurora and Jimmy.

Aurora was purely happy, spinning through the crystalled air, amid palm fronds and wineglasses and waiters and the polished parquet floor. The dance floor was sprung, with a horsehair cushion beneath it, so you could dance all night and never be tired. At the end of every dance, a scattering of applause broke out.

She was not tired these days, but full of vigour, with a little wellspring of pleasure—all the day brightened by the chance to dance with Jimmy. The sinews in his arm, masked by black broadcloth; everything about him so clean and fresh, the size of him just right and the steps that they knew well enough to ignore, to dream through the dances; even more, the perfect understanding that existed between them, and their alikeness.

It was too bad that Bella was angry, she would have to fix that. It was irritating; nothing was fun if Bella and Clover were unhappy. Mama’s grief, on the other hand, compounded of sadness and illness, she could not fix. Around, around, around—counting without knowing that she was counting, her body knowing that they were nearing the end, the end, whirling twice more, once more, and then the sweet little dual kicks and the bow. There. The song was Helen Gone, a racy ragtime two-step, much more fun than the Irving Berlin they’d got to use for Mr. Walker. Helen gone, she could dance all night until the dawn …

They had supper after dancing, and as they ate Jimmy made every effort to draw Clover out. Kind, but mistaken, Aurora thought: Clover was not shy, only leaden. It was a niggling burden to see her so miserable over that odd fish Victor, who would probably sail through the war untouched, playing his strange tricks on the Hun. Catching herself thinking so uncharitably, Aurora stopped, and asked, ‘Have you had a letter from Victor?’

Clover blushed, her delicate skin pinking from the cheeks outward till even her ears were rosy.

Jimmy said, with a comic leer, ‘Someone has a beau?’

But that was too much. Clover, choking, stood up and left the table.

Aurora dashed down her napkin and went after her, but it was no good. Clover locked herself in a marble cubicle, only replying, ‘It is nothing …’ no matter how Aurora begged her to say what the trouble might be. Under the eye of the powder room attendant she could not bully Clover into telling. She went back out.

Jimmy was waiting in the hall. ‘Walker paid our tab—decent of him,’ he said. ‘So we’ve got some coin left, and the night’s a pup. Did you know that Mercy’s Soubrettes are here, playing the little Lyric down by Annabella Street? We could catch their last turn.’ Burlesque worked Mondays (though even those houses stayed dark on Sundays, lest the town make an example of them and shut them down permanently).

Emerging, Clover quietly agreed to go, and they set off.

Although delighted at the prospect of seeing friends again after many months, Aurora hesitated at the down-at-heels lobby of the theatre and the rowdy patrons. Jimmy grinned and elbowed them through to a box, where they sat in relative peace and watched the last of the show: a bad comic whose gimmick was that he hit himself with a rubber chicken; then a very doleful, illogical comedy-melodrama; and finally, Mercy and the Soubrettes. Billed as the Saucy Soubrettes now, instead of Simple.

Mercy wore a skimpy gypsy dress (but no more scandalous than the butterfly costumes had been, Aurora reflected); little Joyful danced behind her in a revolving series of hootchie-kootchie wiggles. Joyful, skinny as ever, stayed fully draped in a Nautch girl curtain; Mercy’s seven veils, none very opaque, came off in due rotation. At the seventh, Aurora turned her head away, but found Clover staring in such surprise that she had to look back: Mercy naked, save for a peach-coloured full-body stocking.

Jimmy laughed at their shock, and after the show ground to a halt he took them round to the tiny dressing room where a dozen girls, the Soubrettes and others from earlier acts, were wiping themselves down in various stages of undress. With the tripling mirrors and the closeness and the lateness of the hour, it seemed to be a roomful of trembling rumps and breasts.

After the first exclamations, a bottle of plum brandy came out of hiding and they all sat down for a general reunion and exchange of news. The Soubrette sisters had split: Temp and simple Patience had been ill, and were in Spokane being bullied by the brother; Mercy and Joy would work the circuit till May, then go back and summer there too, so Patience could be happy. As Mercy and Joy were, to hear that the Belle Auroras were together, doing finely at the Walker, whatever vicissitudes might have come before. The room gradually filled with comics and trick jugglers who seemed to know Jimmy. Jimmy had pulled a new bottle from somewhere, and was filling glasses for the bandmen, some of whom were smoking reefer, which Aurora did not like the smell of. East arrived, without Verrall but with two hoydenish half-naked girls and a couple of pale boys; many toasts were drunk, and Clover settled in to a comfortable game of cards with Joyful, always the sweetest of the girls.

Rising from the drunken rabble to change into street clothes, Mercy pulled Aurora gently behind the screen, setting an arm round her shoulders and one warm hand on her belly.

‘When is the baby coming?’ she whispered, her eyes bright.

The floor seemed to buckle slightly. Aurora put her own hand over Mercy’s, and then, moving Mercy’s aside, over her midsection—feeling it gathered there beneath her hand, taut and firm. Oh, heavens.

‘Did you not know?’

Aurora glanced above the screen to where Jimmy rocked back on his heels, laughing at some joke—then shook her head.

Mercy had seen the glance. ‘Oh, you must be further along than that, to be showing. I’d say four months, maybe five.’

She skinned off her stocking-suit, whipped the legs straight, and rolled them efficiently to keep the wrinkles out; she slung her gypsy bandeau over the screen and wiped the makeup off her chest with a rough towel. In the shadows behind the screen, Mercy’s naked midriff was as flat and smooth as a dish of cream—but so was her own, Aurora had thought.

‘Have you not felt the baby moving? Though you’re the type as won’t show much, ever—I’d be over to the yard if it was me, which it won’t be. I know how to stop all that.’

Moving? Aurora felt the blood humming in her ears, in her veins. ‘What does it feel like?’

‘Like a fish, like a secret. Like you et something that’s alive.’

Then Aurora thought she might be sick again—but was too busy thinking, as a succession of images flashed through her mind: how long it had been since her last blood, Mayhew’s face above her, Jimmy’s. ‘I have always had an uneasy stomach,’ she said quietly.

Mercy laughed. ‘Well, it will be uneasy now!’ She put her arms round Aurora and kissed her. ‘It will be all right, don’t look so! The human race keeps on and on, and all of us were born.’


Come Up Trumps

At home, Aurora found Mama alone, nodding over her thimble, and stroked her cheek to waken her. ‘Come, Mama,’ she whispered, not to disturb her dream. ‘We must put you to bed.’

The bedroom was still pristine—and Bella was nowhere to be seen. Just as she was about to panic, Aurora heard boots climbing the stairs, and Clover and Bella arguing, their voices boarding-house low. Mama sank onto the bed and put her feet up under the covers, turning her back so Aurora could loosen her corset, saying irritably, ‘No, no, don’t, just untie me, I’ll sleep in my wrapper. I’m cold.’

Bella flung the door open, but caught it back before it could slam on the wall. ‘You have no right to scold me!’ she whispered, in a fury. ‘Or to tell me what I cannot do. I’m almost sixteen—I can look after myself!’

‘Not if you are so dead to propriety as to be out in the streets alone at this hour!’

‘Propriety—’ Bella fairly spat.

Clover’s face was tight and cold. ‘You might have run into terrible trouble, and none of us to know what had become of you.’

‘I would not, so there! I was with Nando, and he would protect me, but there was no need, for we were not up to tricks but only gone for a drive for an hour to see the moon, that was all.’

Aurora tucked the gold coverlet around Mama’s neck and kissed her cheek, murmuring that she and Clover would see to Bella; she drew her sisters through into the other room. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Mrs. Jewett will throw us out on our ears, and if you went for an hour how does it come about that it is almost four in the morning?’

Bella gave a jumbled explanation about the state of the Portage road and the darkness and Nando being a very good driver really, except the automobile had given up the ghost five miles out of town: ‘And a very good thing that I dressed warmly, because you know it is an open car, I freeze in it, so we could walk back without harm, and since there was no traffic it was a very good thing, another good thing, that there was a moon to light us, the lantern having broken when the car blew up.’

She got the desired effect from that, and laughed. ‘Well, smoke came out of it and something melted, and Nando says it is not going to go again. But we have thought of the best thing: we’re going to have it carted back to the city and turn it into a vaudeville act! Nando says he’s going to call it “Bella’s First Car,” a very nice honour, I think.’

Aurora sat on the daybed and tried to unclench her stomach. ‘Bella—you cannot run around with Nando in the middle of the night! You know what people will think of you. Perhaps Mrs. Jewett will already be composing her speech to turf us out. How could you be so naughty?’

‘Naughty? I am sixteen! I cannot abide that superior coolness you pretend—you have a dreadful temper, if anyone crosses you!’ Bella said, fierce as a fire. ‘When you were sixteen you had all the money already and were looking after all of us. I don’t even get to keep my own pay!’

‘That’s so, and it isn’t right,’ Clover said. She put her arm around Bella, who stayed stiff, but did not shout or pull away. ‘We’ve been relying on you for too long to look after everything for us. We ought to divvy up the pay packet, and each put back into the kitty for lodging and food.’

Aurora could not sort her thoughts to argue against this: it was absurd, of course, and would lead to arguments and trouble, but she could not—She only wanted to be alone to think, and when was she ever, ever, alone? Through the door to the bedroom she could see Mama’s mouth fallen open, head back in the doped sleep of exhaustion. Her finished white dress, hanging like a lily in the firelight.

And inside her, as she sat still and quiet, she felt a leaf tremble, a tendril grow, a finger drawn across her cheek. She said, ‘Ohh. The baby moved …’

Her sisters dropped beside her.

‘Do not tell Mama,’ she said.


Beautiful Doll

The Belle Auroras’ original week at the Walker was extended ‘by popular demand’ and after two weeks with the If I Had You number, another big hit, they went on the road, down through the Walker chain into Minneapolis and points west. The houses there were not on the scale of the Winnipeg theatre, but were well run and well appointed. Bee Ho Gray travelled too, and Rouclere, so they had familiar company, as well as a few new faces to meet. They were in the money, and Flora was happy not to count the change obsessively at every tea shop. Out of town, the Walker people stayed in hotels, and that was very comfortable too, she and Clover taking one room, Bella and Aurora another.

Jimmy suggested he and Aurora work up a second song-and-dance number, another arrow for their quiver. Challenged, Flora studied sheets and chose Oh, You Beautiful Doll—a song that had never had much made of it. It made her think of Sybil, jaunty and nonsensical. Aurora would look very nice got up as an Eaton Beauty Doll. And she thought to herself, secretly, that the dance would work just as well if Bella were a little girl being given the doll—she worked the steps with that in mind. Jimmy was a dear boy, attentive, an elegant, expert dancer; but there was something not quite right about him. He had lost his clear look, from when they’d first met him back at the Empress. Little pouches under his eyes, a hesitancy, shame of some sort. He was—smirched, she thought.

In any case, not being a widow, Aurora could not marry anyone. When Flora thought about Mayhew her scalp tightened as if her head were swelling. She had learned not to think about him. She bent her mind to creating a lovely, adaptable set of steps, so Bella could do the trick if need be.


An Appetite

Aurora liked the new number very well. She had not told Jimmy about the baby; had not spoken of it again to her sisters, nor they to her. But it was never entirely out of her mind. When she crossed the street she was careful of trams and horses; when she was hungry she ate; when she was tired, she curled up on coats on the dressing-room floor and slept. It seemed that she had to, now that she knew. But the knowledge did not stop her wanting Jimmy—she had such an appetite for him, for the energetic exchange of their lovemaking, that it shocked her. She expected a kind of holiness to descend, instead of greater greed for their snatched opportunities. In the St. Paul Walker Theatre, a closet full of velvet drapes made a dark red bower; in Bismarck, a loose button on a dark, unused dressing-room’s horsehair divan scraped the skin on her back till she bled. She felt terribly guilty about using Jimmy this way, as if he were no person but stood in for all men, as if somehow this action helped her to make the baby grow. Nonsense, of course, but then the need would seize her and she would rise silently from the bed she shared with Bella, and knock very gently on Jimmy’s hotel room door.

It was exhilarating to be able to talk to him as an equal, to argue about the act, to confer, to dance and make the new steps work. But consciousness of the child turned her inward, and even when most enwrapped and invaded by Jimmy, she was alone again. In some sense she belonged only to what was inside her. When she felt guilty, she told herself that, after all, letters from Eleanor Masefield followed him from theatre to theatre, and he did not mention them to her.


Maske of Cupid

Julius was in Winnipeg at the Orpheum when they returned in the middle of March, working with East and Verrall on a new number, a dark little playlet they’d created. On Drunkenness, East called it, saying Julius was just the expert required; they renamed it Tipsychorean Tales for the stage. Before the Belle Auroras went back on at the Walker, Clover went to see the show, sitting by herself in the gallery and having the first good laugh she’d had in the longest time. After the matinee, she walked with Julius along the stone bridge that crossed the river not far from the theatre, glad of his bulk in the fierce wind and the warmth of his dark coat-sleeve, smelling of tobacco and rum, where her hand was tucked. He rambled and rumbled about the other artistes at the Orpheum: ‘The jolly company, in manner of a maske, enrangèd orderly.’

She did not recognize the lines but did not ask their source, and he fell silent. Silence suited her. They watched the water curling under and springing forth from the edges of ice, spring awakening with a faint smell of green, the sun warm though the air was brisk.

‘Your sister and this hatchling matinee idol, what of that?’

Surprised, Clover answered frankly. ‘I think it is a passing fancy, only. She is happy to be with someone young, after Mayhew, but—she is—’

‘With child, I know.’

She looked quickly at Julius’s face, but saw no judgement there. ‘They were legitimately married, as far as any of us knew, whatever the case may really be.’

‘Oh yes, nothing to say Mayhew had married that Spanish floozy in Frisco. Poor Syb was wrong to bring it up at all, but gossip was her meat and drink.’

His face was calm, and his hands, on the stone parapet, were still.

‘I heard your spontaneous monologue, at the Regina,’ he said, surprising Clover again. ‘Unplanned, I take it?’

She had almost forgotten that night when Aurora was so sick and did not come on; that must have been sickness from the baby, of course.

‘You have—a facility,’ Julius said. His mammoth head turned to pin her with an irritated glare. ‘Use that intelligence,’ he told her. ‘One must not waste one’s art.’

A carillon chimed from a church they could not see. Six o’clock.

‘A most delicious harmony, in full strange notes,’ he said. ‘The fraile soule in deepe delight nigh dround.’ He tucked her hand in his arm and led her back towards the theatre. ‘We will warm ourselves by the stove and watch the maskers march forth in trim array. And if the first be Fancy, like a lovely boy of rare aspect, well, we will be kind to him. If he is Desyre, I congratulate your fair sister … I myself am Doubt, the broken reed. Now if it was Victor, your own infatuate, I should have no hesitation. I trust his penmanship suffices you for now.’

Clover fell silent again. No letter, no letter. She had not heard from Victor since the night they walked out into the country, when he did scales beneath the moon.

But on her return to Mrs. Jewett’s that evening, a small packet was waiting, sent over from the Walker. She slid a penknife along the manila and spread the packet open on the dresser, under the lamp’s light. A red silk scarf, like a cardinal’s wing—and something wrapped inside it.

She unrolled the scarf and out fell a picture postcard from Quebec, one from Montreal, and a steamship ticket for the SS Alaunia, sailing from Montreal to London, England, May 15, 1915.

On the back of the postcard depicting the port of Montreal: I love you always. You know. My mother has a house, 24 St. Quintin Avenue, I wish you could—then something scratched out, in black impatient strokes. On the back of the postcard of Quebec: Come. Please come. Attached to the ticket by a brass clip: a bank draft for fifty pounds.


Precious Prize

Settled at Mrs. Jewett’s boarding house again, Aurora would get up as if making a trip to the convenience when Bella drowsed off, then tap on Jimmy’s door and slip like a ghost down the wooden stairs to meet him in the dark back parlour. The doors slid soundlessly along the track which she had waxed with a candle stub; the heaviness of the doors matched the heaviness in her body, the ground-running depth of how badly she wanted him to drive inside her and make her climb that strange mountain again. One night she stayed in his bed almost all night, his velvety skin under hers. After Mayhew’s body she was surprised by Jimmy’s springing youth, and found a gratifying pleasure in giving him pleasure. The night sessions were driven, racing—for him too, murmuring in her ear, precious, precious. Since they did not ever make a public display, those night whispers were sweet.

She did not know what all this was doing to the baby. Now, in early March, a visible mound protruded when she took off her corset, so she stopped taking it off in anyone’s presence, including Jimmy’s. He laughed at her modesty, but was compliant. She could not lace tight any longer, the baby would not let her. Though cut in the new flowing line, the white dress was fitted enough that she could not bear to fasten the middle buttons. She made herself a bridging-piece to hold the edges together underneath the cummerbund. Clover helped her dress for the number and said not a word about it—but she had grown so silent, lately, that Aurora hardly noticed the kindness of that reserve.

As soon as the new number was ready, Walker had promised to slot the Beautiful Doll number in as his first-act closer. The Belle Auroras were resting; Walker’s notion was to let Jimmy and Aurora have the limelight to themselves for a week first, and then put the girls back on to open the second act. Manager reports had been glowing as they played the western theatres, and Aurora believed he would be true to his word.

They refined the choreography with Mama on Monday morning till Aurora was out of breath and dizzy, begging for a rest. In the afternoon, she and Jimmy went over to the Walker to show their steps to Bert Pike, the orchestra leader, before orchestra rehearsal the next morning.

‘Hallooo!’ Jimmy called, pulling open the doors to the dark auditorium. Aurora shivered—an empty theatre always spooked her. Far in the distance they heard Bert answer, then a snap and the work-lights glowed onstage. More hard metallic snaps: a row of house-lights came up, enough that they could make their way down the aisle and up the moveable stairs onto the stage.

She set their sides on the rehearsal piano and showed Bert the modifications they’d made to the lyrics; he worked through it once while they footed the steps, as one might mouth the words of a song, marking out areas on the stage they’d be able to use.

Aurora put herself into the Eaton Beauty Doll position, eyes staring and arms stiff, to let Jimmy carry her as they moved into the singing break:

‘Precious prize, close your eyes

Now we’re going to visit lovers’ paradise

Press your lips again to mine,

For love is king of everything.’

In the empty space, with only the tinny rehearsal piano, the song sounded weak, even forlorn. ‘If you ever leave me how my heart will ache …’

‘All right now,’ said Bert, and they ran for their marks as he chugged into the jaunty introduction, four chords, then one, two, three, four: step-step slide, step-step glide, sweeping farther than they’d yet been able to with this number. ‘Let me put my arms around you,’ Jimmy sang in her ear. ‘I could never live without you—’

They locked together to begin their cakewalk twirls, and because she was tired, Aurora felt the hard mass of the baby gathered into a tightening ball. She knew she ought to stop, but Bert had come in especially, and they had to start tomorrow. She eased back from Jimmy, to give herself room to breathe. When the run was done, she stiffened and posed as he went into the chorus again.

‘I want to hug you but I fear you’d break—

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you beautiful doll!’

Then the man stood still, admiring, and the doll danced. Aurora put her mind to it and held herself up through the sixteen stiff-armed twirls of her solo, and then there was only one more chorus for them to sing together, until the music ran out and she could stop. They held the final pose for a moment, and broke off to bow to Bert—and then, hearing applause from the seats, out to the house.

Thinking Walker must have come to see, Aurora went forward to the footlights and shaded her eyes to ask, ‘Were we all right? Did you like it?’

‘Very much indeed,’ came the answer, in a voice like sherry-coloured velvet.

Aurora backed away. Not Mrs. Walker. Who was it?

The woman walked down the raked aisle into the spill of light from the stage, the prow of her dress leading, furs swaying behind her. A perfectly composed face looked up from under her shadowing hat-brim, great eyes glowing and hands held out to applaud again. Eleanor Masefield.

The two onstage stood still for a moment. Her hand still in Jimmy’s, Aurora felt the contraction in his fingers, and then a second, purposeful pressure, before he let her hand drop and walked to the lip of the stage. Between two footlights he vanished; as her eyes adjusted, his silhouette reappeared.

‘You, here!’ he said, cool and detached, with an underlay of warmth that might be anger or affection. ‘What brings you to the sticks?’ His light voice almost laughed.

Beads of jet dazzled on Miss Masefield’s bodice. Jet sparked in her hat as well, and as she lifted her skirt to climb the stairs, fabulously lovely black boots appeared. She was black-rimmed and beautiful; her complicated gown was a deep ocean-going blue. She beamed suddenly, showing the impish gap between her teeth as if she were a boy, and moved forward past Jimmy to hold out a hand to Aurora. ‘Why, it’s Miss—don’t tell me—Evans. Ainsley. One of the little sisters.’

Aurora touched the outstretched hand, seeing no way not to, then reclaimed hers to pull her skirt out and drop a brief ironic curtsy. The white dress was no longer pristine and crisp, after an hour of vigorous dancing, but she stood very straight and braced herself, not knowing exactly for what.

Miss Masefield turned, hat hiding her face as a cloud obscures the moon, and held out her other hand to Jimmy. ‘I’ve missed you so much, Jimmy,’ she said, the laugh-note in her voice now.

He waited.

‘You are the only one who understands me—I’ve had to fire that cub in New York.’

Jimmy came into the circle of light, taking Eleanor’s hand, with such a concentrated gaze that Aurora felt invisible. She had faded, in her white dress, into the pale backdrop.

‘Come, lunch with me, I’m famished from the train,’ the actress said, turning abruptly, and catching sight, as she did so, of Bert Pike. ‘Oh, Bert! How lovely to see you,’ she cried. Bert gave a brief, almost rude salute, and Eleanor moved gracefully towards him, her skirt somehow flowing, although, in the latest fashion from New York, it did not touch the boards.

The luncheon invitation had quite clearly not included Aurora; she smoothed her hands down her white lawn frock, trying to remember how nice it once had been. Her mother’s stitches amateur, but very tiny, very loving.

Miss Masefield had placed herself theoretically out of earshot, engaging Bert in an earnest (and to Aurora’s eyes, entirely sham) exchange. Jimmy clasped Aurora quickly to him, his cheek on hers. He pressed her hand again and said, in a low voice, ‘I’d better find out what she wants.’

Asking for approval, which Aurora found cowardly.

‘I think we are quite finished,’ she said, cool in her turn. ‘If Bert needs no more.’ Bert’s face peered out from behind that cartwheel hatbrim; he gave a quick, dismissing nod.

Aurora went backstage. But she could not climb up the dressing-room stairs as yet. Her middle was clenched and unhappy, almost hot. She should not have danced so long this morning. When she heard the others leave (Eleanor Masefield’s mellifluous laugh easily floating up the aisle over the two men’s voices), Aurora went back out to the empty stage to retrieve their sides, walking through the circles of light the electrician had left on.

The footlights still glowed, and the overhead lights ghosted. Do not be afraid or lonely, she told the child inside her. The dead space will be alive again tomorrow. The house sat empty, waiting, and what a lucky girl she was to have this stage, this life. She stood staring into the black void beyond the lights, then sank down to the boards, skirt pooling around her, and pressed her hands over her eyes to black out everything.


King of Everything

Jimmy returned to the boarding house that evening after supper. He found Aurora on the window seat in the back parlour. Clover, polishing her fiddle at the piano, wrapped it in a red scarf and left the room.

Jimmy stood at the door, looking at her, and then came across the floor.

‘She wants me to go back to New York tonight. There’s a sleeper—’ He stopped, and Aurora was glad. Too much between them, and between him and Miss Masefield. ‘I can’t—I can’t miss this,’ he said. ‘It’s the Palace.’

Oh, well then.

‘New York is assured. She’s given me a contract for eighteen months. At a thousand a week.’ His mouth closed at the end of each sentence, Aurora saw. Closed, like his face. She took up a cushion on the window seat. To give him room, he would think, but really to cover her middle where she had loosed her sash.

‘I’ve come back to pack,’ he said, not sitting down.

That too, she admired: that he could be so honest.

‘I owe her a great deal. Everything.’

‘Not everything,’ Aurora said. ‘You’ve given good service, over the years.’ That was cruel, she should not have said it.

He did not flinch, he laughed. That was a bad sign. ‘You know how to wound me.’

She laughed too, almost. ‘You know better.’

He stepped to one side, and then back to face her. Unable, it seemed, to stand still. Impatient. She felt very patient, very old.

‘You know you would never—’

She wondered what he had intended to say. She looked up, but could not make her eyes focus properly on his face, to see what he meant.

‘You are always alone, even when we are most together.’

That was true. It was a fault in her, she knew it. ‘We might get to New York together,’ she said. It was all she would do, to beg.

‘In ten years! Or twelve, or never.’

‘There is something other than success.’

‘Not for me.’

‘Or a better kind of success, than riding the skirt of an old woman.’

Then he looked entirely miserable. Unfair of her. What else had she done herself? They were both cheap at the price.

‘The cab’s to come at nine,’ he said.

‘I will help you pack your things.’ She gathered her book and shawl, and went ahead of him up the stairs to his room, the third-floor front.

Everything is undone, she thought, watching him pile shirts into the leather suitcase he was so proud of. Eleanor Masefield had had it custom-made, with his initials in gilt. When he turned to the bureau, Aurora undid his mother’s silver bracelet and let it slip from her wrist down into the suitcase.

The case was packed. He set it on the floor beside his trunk, moved her back onto the bed and kissed her, and kissed her, and pushed her skirt up. In the lamp’s light his eyes were shining with tears.

‘This is what I am good at,’ Jimmy said. ‘Isn’t it?’ He rose up into her.

Then it was over and she wished she had not, not one more time. She pulled herself out from under his leg, tidied her dress as well as she could, kissed him and left the room.


The Eleventh

Clover looked up the train schedule to Montreal. To be on the ship sailing May fifteenth, she must leave Winnipeg on the twelfth. Three weeks. The eleventh would be safer. Even in May, a train could be held up by snow, going over the lakehead by Port Arthur. Or there could be trouble with the track.

Ever since Bella had demanded her own pay, Clover had got hers too. She had enough for a sleeper and meals, and Victor’s fifty pounds to spare at journey’s end. If she did not go in May, shipping might cease for the duration of the war.

Perhaps he meant her to stay with his mother, to look after her. Or if that did not work out, she was sturdy and could do many things to earn a living.

What she could not seem to do was tell her sisters, or Mama, her plans. None of them knew Victor like she did; they would think him mad, and her mad to leave. But Aurora was partnered with Jimmy and the new number would lift them into the big-time for certain, Clover thought. Bella could tag along, and there would be a baby to look after too, so that would keep Mama happy, and none of them would miss her.

The moment would come—must come—when even her sisters, who ignored the war as far as they were able, would see she had to go.


You Need That Pride

Mr. Walker agreed to see Aurora first thing in the morning, asking Dot to bring a cup of tea with an extra nod, which seemed to mean call my wife! For along with the tea, in very short order, came Mrs. Walker.

Aurora had had time to explain that she was without a partner and to offer the Belle Auroras as substitute for the first-act closing slot, which would now be empty; Walker waited for his wife to sit, and said, ‘Seems we’ve lost young Jimmy to Miss Masefield’s New York company, Hattie.’

Mrs. Walker, imposing in brown corded silk, pursed her full mouth and considered. ‘Well, that’s no bad thing in my opinion—you couldn’t marry the fellow, in your situation, and I had my doubts whether it was suitable to book the two of you, smelling of April and May and dancing so romantic, with you not even a widow. And beginning to show, my dear,’ she added, with a kindly glance that made bile rise in Aurora’s throat till she thought it must burst out into screeching.

What could she answer? It was no slander but perfectly true, and Mrs. Walker had every right to say so. She ran a polite vaudeville house and must guard its reputation.

Aurora would not look down, however, but met her eyes and refused the shame she was being so benevolently offered. ‘Therefore,’ she said, speaking low and careful, ‘you may be happier with the same pretty number performed with my youngest sister, as a child with an Eaton Beauty Doll. The dance is whimsical and charming and so is my sister, as you know, and I’m persuaded we can pull it off this very day, at the evening show at least, for Bella has watched rehearsals.’

‘You need that pride, to be a vaude artiste,’ Mrs. Walker said, approvingly. ‘To suffer through the constant trial of self and skill. You’re a nice little dancer, and so was he. I could see you making a big hit. But without him, no. Your sister in his place—no, not for us, not so soon after you’ve played.’

‘But we’ll still take the girls for that spot I’d mentioned, eh, Hat?’ Walker asked her. ‘Second-act openers, not next week but the week after?’

Prisoners in the dock must feel like this, Aurora thought.

Mrs. Walker looked sober. ‘I think we’ll have to wait on that, Mr. Walker,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure that without the balance of the romance we can fit in the sister act.’

‘We can do Lakmé,’ Aurora said, and could have bitten her tongue out.

Mrs. Walker gave her a firm nod. ‘A little resting time may be just what you girls need,’ she said. ‘I’ll see her out, Mr. Walker, I’m going myself.’


Sweetness in Song

Verrall passed their door on his way to rehearsal call at the Orpheum, and heard Flora’s first shrieking. He shrank against the wall and would have snuck down the stairs in a cowardly fashion, but then he heard Aurora give one cry, and then there was a smash—‘Oh lord,’ he said to himself. ‘There goes the bureau mirror. Seven years’ bad luck.’

Taking his courage in both fists, he gave a timid knock upon the door, and when nobody noticed, opened it. As he’d suspected, glass lay sprinkled across the Turkey carpet, a glittering mound on the hearth tiles where Bella was sweeping it with the little broom and coal shovel. He ought to fetch East, really.

‘Trouble?’ he asked, in as nonchalant a voice as he could manage.

‘Only the usual ruin of everything,’ Flora cried. ‘A man too weak to break with temptation!’

‘It was a thousand a week she offered,’ Aurora said mildly. She was lying flat on the bed in a tangle of sheets, wearing her outside coat and the frippery blue hat that Verrall loved. Her boots, stuck out into the room, were still wet with snow.

‘He’s gone, is he? Well, good riddance,’ said Verrall. ‘I never liked him much.’

Hiccuping over the broken glass, Bella raised her head and said, ‘No, no, it is all that nasty actress. He could not refuse a thousand a week. She is like a mother to him, you know.’

Aurora cracked a laugh and sat up. ‘Verrall, could you take me to the Orpheum this morning? I met Martin once, with Mayhew. At least I can sound him out. I might be able to put it to him—’

‘If you are looking for a gig,’ Verrall said, ‘I am your man. Martin asked about your bookings while you was gone to points south! If you care to come along that would be sound management, but we must make a mile because East is already shouting from the door.’

Indeed they could all hear him, now that Mama had subsided into mere moaning.

‘I think you must sign up with our booking agent, Miss Aurora,’ Verrall said as they went down the stairs. ‘He does very well for us, and the portion that we pay him is repaid tenfold in extra dates.’

He wished he could say what was in his heart: that the doltish Jimmy was a fair way to a drunkard anyway, and of unsavoury habits, and everybody knew it to be so. But the cad had sloped off and what need, now, to hurt her more?

Earle Martin seemed to think he was stealing a march on Walker, snatching the Belle Auroras out from under his nose, and with a brand-new novelty dance as well. Their number would be filled out with a soldier song and (Aurora having a moment of inspiration) the sentimental favourite Songs My Mother Taught Me. Verrall remembered with approval that Martin had been very fond of his mother; he was damp in the eye by the time Aurora had run through it for him.

‘We’ll bill it as Belle Auroras: Sweetness in Song,’ Martin said, blowing his nose horribly on a dirty handkerchief. ‘In two.’

The Orpheum was no kind of class, and the floors were grimy, but on the snowy sidewalk outside, Verrall was rewarded with Aurora’s quick, fervent hug, and a kiss on his hollow cheek.


Bella’s New Car

With the Ninepins also booked in at the Orpheum the chance was too good to miss: Nando had decided it was time to test out the exploding car sketch. With his mother’s doleful blessing (she took a few weeks off to lie weeping in bed, eating chocolates), he and Bella worked non-stop on effects and banter.

Clover loved the new sketch. She watched it every show, seeing new bits of invention and precision each time. Bella had grown into her comic self so brilliantly. She and Nando were a perfect match, Clover thought; she also thought, with greater comfort, that it was they who would hit the big-time after all, now that Jimmy had decamped, and carry Aurora and Mama along with them.

The Orpheum stage was massive, made for stunts, but even so, when the rippling curtains opened in three, the crowd gasped to see Nando and Bella driving their flivver on from the wings (pulled by stagehands with a hidden rope, while the glass-crash man made a tolerable engine racket on his machines). An automobile, onstage!

Hinky-dinky cacophony music travelled along with them, a jaunty outing on a summer day, Bella enjoying the sun and the breeze. ‘Hold my head scarf for me, Tommy!’ she begged in pretty flirtation. She had just rearranged her tumbling curls when the car’s motor coughed and spat.

They lurched forward again, then the car coughed again, and stopped.

They sat, Nando staring blankly, until Bella said, ‘Do something! Talk to it!’

Nando got out and lifted the hood, and disappeared into it, feet waggling. A moment later an ominous sputter like a fizzing ginger-beer bottle (exactly like, in fact, since inside the hood Nando had been shaking one like crazy) finished with a terrific explosion and a flash (as he lit the flashpan), and Nando (having hooked himself onto the flying-harness) was blown backwards away from the car, blackfaced and flailing, and fell clump onto the ground.

Bella shrieked and hid her eyes.

Nando wiped his face with his kerchief, then realized it was Bella’s pink scarf, now blackened. He made a great show of hiding the ruined scarf.

Regaining some courage and human decency, Bella exclaimed and jumped out of the car and rushed to him, applying first aid in the form of blown kisses (no actual kisses being yet permitted onstage, even at the relaxed Orpheum).

She sat him up, and he fell down.

She stood him up. He fell forward, flat on his nose, except that she caught him in the nick of time, and they both fell sprawling in a very improper attitude (so that Clover caught her breath, hearing Sybil say, ‘Begs for a blue envelope!’)—and were up, next instant, Bella giving the cheekiest dimpling wave to the manager in the booth.

Nando dusted himself off and thanked Bella, but no, thank you very much, she was just a woman and he could fix the ding-danged car himself. He rustled in the trunk for a tool box, pulled out a gigantic wrench, and made his way round to the front of the car, legs rubbery from the explosion. He made his legs such instruments of comedy: stiff and limp at once, unpredictably non–weight-bearing, expressive both of excruciating pain and irrepressible gaiety. Just watching him walk round to the front of the car Clover could see why Bella was so fond of him.

The headlight fell off in his hand.

Oh! It was hot! He hot-potatoed it, tossed it up in the air, bright and fragile and dangerous. Bella, leaning forward to give helpful unwanted advice, caught it—ouch! She juggled it delicately, carefully (Clover knew how hard she had worked at that juggling) and tossed it back to him; he whipped it back, like a badminton birdie. They volleyed it twice, and then, being burned again, Nando gave it an angry smack and it smashed into the stage. The sugar-glass took forever to make each morning, Mrs. Dent standing fretting over the stove.

The front bumper fell off with a clang. Nando caught it up, handed it to Bella, and the back bumper fell slantwise with an ominous creak—he rushed to it and something exploded at the front, giving Bella instant blackface. She opened her bright eyes at the audience and leaned back over the car, in time for the radiator to spray out a jet of water and wash her face, till she jumped back, dripping.

The two of them danced around the car reattaching the bumpers backwards, and the audience-side door fell off. The wheels went flat, each one hissing in turn, till the last wheel hopped right off its axle and went rolling all over the stage, almost out into the audience. Nando raced, tripping over his own feet, hopping the wheel back and forth, and caught it each night, just before it beaned someone.

Then he was angry. He took Bella to task: ‘You could have killed someone!’ Finger wagging.

She wagged right back at him since the whole thing was his fault, and—His fault! why, it was she who was distracting him with her endless chatter—Then Bella leaned over and kissed him (the kiss not visible, of course, just the back of her head and her arm round his neck), and demurely returned upright, with a secret smile.

Nando’s face went still, enraptured. His fist relaxed and his arm dropped, as he entered a trance of beauty. After a moment, his hand crept over and clasped hers.

Together they approached the car with dread. The horn toot-tooted: watch out!

After a breath, the car exploded, collapsed into twenty-five pieces.

A sway-backed horse wandered onstage, and they mounted and rode away.

Show after show, Clover sat in the midst of the cheering audience and ached to think of leaving Bella.